(Update 2019-08-07: this article is now available in Brazilian Portuguese: 10 dicas para um site WordPress mais rápido) — Website speed is a huge factor in your search engine (specifically Google) ranking: As part of that effort, today we’re including a new signal in our…

Wow, that title is a bit of a mouthful. OK, so let me decipher: you can customise WordPress excerpts to add a “read more” link to post excerpts, e.g. as per this (cleaned up) example from the codex: function new_excerpt_more( $more ) { global $post;…

What do you do when you try and find a site that allows the re-sale of preloved cloth nappies but the only one that did exist has closed down operations? You buy the site of course. As briefly alluded to in the last post, I’ve…

I’ve mentioned a couple of times this month that I’ve been working with a client for a dedicated 8 hours a week to give me a little bit of fixed income and gets me out of the house twice a week. Despite needing to get…

I had a couple of clients (rightly) tell me off this week because schedules had slipped and this wasn’t communicated as well as it could have been. I only have myself to blame, and I don’t mind being honest about it. I should have better…

I officially released the premium version of my PHP mail form last night. Partly because it’s been on the cards for a while, and partly because I wanted to get started on my plan to be mortgage free in five years. I can’t hang about…

* sorry, I couldn’t help myself. Yesterday I opened my work inbox first thing to a panicked email from a client (Sutton Community Farm) labelled “URGENT” – their website had gone down (again) with a Resource Limit Reached error. I quickly shot off a reply…

Websites that are glorified shopping carts with maybe three dynamic pages are maintained by teams of people around the clock, because the truth is everything is breaking all the time, everywhere, for everyone. Right now someone who works for Facebook is getting tens of thousands…

One of the things I am really keen on doing this year is to improve my workflow / development process. I have a very “make it up as I go along” approach to building a website (as demonstrated by my live dev ;)) which I…